Electronic devices including mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), tablets, notebook, smart watches, and the like have become integral part of human life, and these devices need protection from unauthorized access, as their users often keep sensitive information or carry out sensitive activities on these devices. From among many prevalent techniques of user authentication, biometric authentication is quite reliable due to the uniqueness of people in majority of the biometric identification techniques. For instance, fingerprint scan, iris or facial recognition have been used for a long time for access control associated with electronic devices. Further, among the biometric authentication techniques, iris recognition is highly reliable and one of the safest technique, as in reality, every individual in the world has an iris with a unique pattern that is different from others. For instance, no two irises of different people are the same, and in fact even an individual's left and right eyes have different iris patterns. Generally, with iris recognition, a false acceptance rate of an iris recognition system is around 1 in 1.2 millions and the false rejection rate is nearly 0 percent which is superior to other biometric authentication techniques.
For the purposes of iris recognition, iris samples (images) of the user are shot by specialized infrared cameras that use light emitting diode (LED) to illuminate the irises of the user. However, in real world, success of iris recognition attempted in a certain lighting condition depends on iris samples registered in that lighting condition. For instance, if the registration of the iris samples has been done in an indoor lighting condition, users may encounter errors if they try to get their irises recognized in daylight which has infrared in light.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations, which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known devices.